How a Comma Costs You Thousands of Dollars

In a previous post, I picked some nits. I said that there are little things that stand out to me as errors, and, while not everyone might agree that what I pointed out was important, at least you could have agreed that those things were wrong.

But so what? Why does it matter if your blog post, or your campaign landing page, or your direct mail letter is perfect? What does it matter if you misuse “their” for “there”, or have the wrong “it’s” when you really needed “its”? Who cares, besides grammarians? Who bothers to count the 7 bullet points you’ve listed, to see if that matches the 8 you promised in your headline?

Everyone.

Everyone cares about it. It’s inherent. It’s inside. It’s deep within our subconscious. It goes to trust, it goes to authority, it goes to whether or not I should even keep listening to you.

Because when you make a mistake, and I notice it, even if I don’t notice it notice it, it affects me. It sets off a little counter in my brain. And when my counter reaches my limit, I’m done.

I stop believing you. And what’s worse, I stop reading. I stop listening. I step out of the universe of potential clients (or donors) and join the 98% who don’t give. And I’m not alone. Everyone does it.

Everyone has their own limit on how many errors they’ll accept before completely rejecting you. And that boundary may be different for each piece. But it exists. And it’s costing you. Because when your audience reaches their limit, they check out. They’re done. They’re not going to give, they’re not going to volunteer, they’re not going to tell their neighbor.

It costs you authority … time … sales … donations.

Again, you might think I’m being picky. Perhaps I am. But even the scientists at NASA recognize a need to reduce errors. Their post, How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? illustrates this very well. They have determined that 15 decimal points of pi (3.141592653589793) is enough. This gets them the precision they need for virtually everything they do. They’re not losing spacecraft around Venus or Pluto with that kind of perfection.

NASA recognizes the need to eliminate errors. That’s why they use a more precise value of pi than the 3.14 virtually all the rest of us will be able to get by with. Because they don’t want to make any mistakes along the way and destroy their mission. If they did, if they allowed imprecision to flow through their work, they wouldn’t be working very long.

So what happens when you allow it?

Let me bring this back to copywriting. To nonprofit donations. To your audience and how they perceive you.

Let’s say your e-mail contains just 3 little errors. You spelled “performance” as “preformance”, you had an extra “,” at one point, and you used the word “reigns” instead of “reins”. Suppose 5% are turned off by the very first one. And 20% are turned off by the next, and the last 25% by the third.

These three errors might be completely missed by 50% of your audience. Okay. Only then do they have a chance to be influenced by your offer. Only then do they get a chance to take action. This is your effective audience.

Had you fixed only one error, your effective audience would go from 50% to 75%. Fixing 2 is 75% to 95%. Fixing all three means that everyone gets a chance to hear your whole message.

Suppose your 3-error mailing has a response rate of 2%. That 2% of the total is, in effect, 4% of the effective audience. That means, had you fixed even one error, you’d expand the effective audience, and your overall response rate would be at 3%. Fix all 3, and it’s up to 4%. Now you’re talking.

Put some numbers to it.

Let’s make-believe for a minute. Imagine an acquisition campaign that costs $50,000, with a 2% response rate, garners $65,000 in donations. Not bad! A $15,000 positive campaign. Suppose you went through your letter with an additional copy review, and caught all 3 of those errors. Let’s say you invest $1,000 in this. What’s the total cost now? $51,000. And the return? $130,000, because your effective audience doubled. A $79,000 positive campaign.

What’s the ROI of that copy review? Pay $1,000, get $65,000. Pretty amazing.

Okay, maybe these numbers are a little facetious. But might it be worth it to spend a little more time critiquing your copy in order to get a lot more return? How much would you have to invest to see a positive ROI on that review? Just $1 more than the cost. It wouldn’t be hard to get $1,001 in additional responses. That 2% has to improve only to 2.04% in order to get there. Is that reasonable? Absolutely.

And if it improves to 2.4%, that’s a $76,000 campaign, and a $10,000 ROI on that copy review. Pretty easy to see how small improvements can be very valuable.

Conclusion

Grammatical errors, far from being something that your audience just ignores, build up over the course of your communication. They break down trust, and they reduce your effective audience. Ultimately, this reduces donor confidence, degrades your reputation, and erodes donations. It’s in the best interest of your nonprofit for everything you do to be as clean as possible.